Tagged: cultural critique

Prior to heading home for Thanksgiving, I picked up the Oregon Trail card game. As I wrote about before, my mother has recently expressed an interest in playing games, and I thought the game would be fun and nostalgic. I...

I recently watched the documentary Can We Take a Joke? When Outrage and Comedy Collide. As you might imagine, the premise is that outrage is ruining comedy. I was curious. We hear similar arguments here at NYMG: We are ruining...

I’m currently working my way through Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. I’m writing about it here because the book was described to me as feminist science fiction written by a man. I had forgotten that description until I had gotten a little...

I’ve been watching the second season of Fargo, which is a great show. The second season is set in the 70’s, so much like Mad Men, the sexism is blindingly obvious, as it was in the first season of Fargo....

We are pleased to announce the debut of the first installment of the Invisibility Blues series, along with its new home here on NYMG. In this first episode, we look at character creation in a variety of games, focusing on...

When I tell people I teach game design, they often immediately assume I do programming. And yes, I do some of that, but as anyone that teaches game design will tell you, it’s much more than that. Increasingly I think...

I’ll never forget the moment, years ago, when I mentally “picked” a flower while walking into a Blockbuster Video. I glanced at their sidewalk planter, which had a number of beautiful pink and purple flowers in it, and I swear...

“Why not just review a feminist game?” I was discussing several new games with a friend and trying to decide which one I would write a review for last week, when he asked me that question. At first I thought...

Yesterday I was sitting in the coffee shop reading Miguel Sicart’s latest book, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay and giggling at the passage that read Cocktail parties are terrible places for doing philosophy. Yet when a polite stranger...

In the past few weeks I have played both Saints Row IV and Grand Theft Auto V. Numerical markers aside these games have a lot in common. Both of them involve crime (and lots of it), both build characters based...